Claims of Third World national allegory import Romantic primitivism and Christian metaphysics onto nationalism

Evidence

To say that allegory is the main form of writing in the Third World, and to declare that nationalism is the organizing narrative principle of this allegory, is to bestow upon Third World nationalism the quasi-religious function of a metaphysic, of the same kind that Christianity held for medieval Europe. This particular way of mapping the disappearance of allegory in Europe after the Renaissance and its reappearance in the contemporary Third World also tends to extend, with a peculiar twist, those tendencies in European Romanticism which often sought in non- Europe that ‘organicity’ which was s_aid to have existed once but then to have been lost within Europe - not to speak of the familiar liberal idea, recouped with great flair and given much currency on the Left by Benedict Anderson, that the ‘imagined community’ of the nation comes up, chronologically later bur to satisfy some of those same needs of belonging, when (and where) the ‘sacred communities’ of religion break up. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 1244

Categorization

• XREF: Core to reader’s project: Ahmad’s materialist critique that discourse-first literary mapping performs on ‘nationalism’ exactly the essentializing bestowal strategic essentialism worries about — links to the Foucauldian race-struggle and Spivak lineage driving this research. — connects to: Third-Worldist theory grants nationalism the quasi-religious role Christianity held in medieval Europe — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, 550; Nationalism’s borrowings from religion do not make religion its source — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 946; Cultural nationalism can smuggle in obscurantism merely by inverting the traditionmodernity binary — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 49
• QUESTION: Is attributing a unifying metaphysic to Third World nationalism necessarily a discourse-determinist evasion of material/class structure, or can it be read as Ahmad himself conceding nationalism does unify across classes in anti-colonial struggle?

Broader Connections

• Third-Worldist theory grants nationalism the quasi-religious role Christianity held in medieval Europe #corroborates (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 550
• Nationalism’s borrowings from religion do not make religion its source #qualifies (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 946
• Cultural nationalism can smuggle in obscurantism merely by inverting the traditionmodernity binary #qualifies (0.72) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 49